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Bryce @brycemecum.com · 18/09/2026

TIL the new SQL cells on Observable support not just databases but variables defined in your notebook _and_ they output Arrow Tables which can be fed back into SQL cells: observablehq.com/@amoeba/sql-.... Nice.

observablehq.com

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Bryce @brycemecum.com · 17/09/2026

woops. I think I poisoned the context with my misuse of MB. 256GB would be very tough.

Bryce @brycemecum.com · 17/09/2026

That’s a lot. I have to run a recursive cargo clean every so often on my 512MB disk machine

Bryce @brycemecum.com · 16/09/2026

Interesting! I had no idea.

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Bryce @brycemecum.com · 13/09/2026

I've never been to Houston but this thread may help! bsky.app/profile/usrb... cc @usrbinr.bsky.social

"Maintainer" has a special meaning to CRAN and only one person can be a maintainer and the maintainer email can't be a listserv. All of this requires maintainers of R packages be constantly vigilant.

In this case, Dewey is the maintainer so he did get the email. Non-maintainers (me) have to keep track of these things manually. And he submitted a fix but wasn't sure if it was enough.

Not new, no. I recently learned that the arrow R package is one of the most deadlined R packages on CRAN.

Multiline XY-plot titled "Top 10 packages by CRAN deadlines since 2023" with subtitle "Source tools:::CRAN_package_issues(), captured on 2026-07-04". The X axis is labeled "Date" and has major axis ticks of 2023, 2024, 2025, and 2026. The Y axis is labeled "Cumulative CRAN dadlines" and has major axis ticks of 0, 5, 10, 15, and 20. Numerous colored lines appear, all generally going up and to the right. Labeled lines include duckdb, data.table, arrow, notably.

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Yep. CRANs policies have caused a lot of package maintainers to: 1. Remove tests 2. Remove runnable examples 3. Remove URLs in docs and references (CRAN checks URLS) It's not purely a negative thing though, it's complicated.

More or less. I can come up with more positive ways to spin it. The compounding issue here is that contacting CRAN for an exception can be hard.

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Yeah. I think that’s a better approach if we decide to make a change.

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Bryce @brycemecum.com · 11/09/2026

Thanks Kevin, I appreciate the reply. Do you recommend any particular regex libs? For this bit of code, a simple build matters a lot (having a toml++ dep was even argued over), so maybe doing it without a regex at all would be better.

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h/t to @eddelbuettel.com for messaging me about the removal this morning though!

Bryce @brycemecum.com · 11/09/2026

Quick poll: When would you like CRAN to archive your package? A: Umm, never? B: Three days before posit::conf, where you're giving a talk about said package

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Bryce @brycemecum.com · 10/09/2026

Finally watched this, it's great! Thanks for sharing.

Nic Crane @niccrane.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Reposted by Bryce

Loved this talk by @felienne.bsky.social - and the points about "hard" things being values over "simple" things resonated a lot! www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-6-...

youtube.com

AI made me doubt everything about programming by Felienne Hermans - DDD Europe 2026

YouTube video by Domain-Driven Design Europe

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Bryce @brycemecum.com · 08/09/2026

New post on the company blog that does a great job showing just how convoluted using ODBC is and how painless database access can be with ADBC and dbc: columnar.tech/blog/odbc-dr...

columnar.tech

The ODBC Driver Scavenger Hunt

ADBC’s advantages start before the first query runs.

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Too cool. A few of us at @columnar.tech were just sharing how foundation D3 was for us so it's really special to see Arrow in Observable. My first real piece of software (with actual users) was built just as an excuse to learn D3.

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This release is cool for a lot of reasons but my favorite is that the new Observable does database access with ADBC and returns results as Arrow. And, as a bonus, it uses @columnar.tech 's dbc (dbc.how) to install drivers.

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If you ever want to toss any bug reports, feature requests, or ideas over, please feel free to reach out.